Many organizations have a substantial number of computers in operation, often located far apart. For example, a company with many factories may have a computer at each location to keep track of inventories, monitor productivity, and do the local payroll. Initially, each of these computers worked in isolation from the others. For example, there was no communication between the two computers that kept track of the local payrolls at two different factories. At some point, the management decided to connect them to be able to extract and correlate information about the entire company. The network-based applications allow the computers across the network to share resources such as programs, equipment, and data.
A common computer network model includes a client-server model where one computer acts as the client machine and another computer acts as the server machine. The client requests the server to do some work such as transmit data to the client. The server then does the work.
A client machine such as a personal computer typically has included non-network based applications. The client machine may be coupled to a network such as the Internet, a Local Area Network (LAN), a Wide Area Network (WAN), an alternate private or public network, or a combination of these and/or other networks. Over some networks, the World Wide Web sites (Web sites) can be accessed through Internet browsers such as the Netscape Navigator and the Internet Explorer. Examples of non-network based applications include spreadsheets and word processors.
It would be useful to allow for client side integration of network based and non-network based applications.